Overall, I consider it a success. The next stage is to write the damn thing (then image correct, rescan, collect and bind and find someone to sell it to the good people). I've recruited a copy editor, we'll see if that helps. It's not someone I know really, which I think is a good thing. Someone who isn't as familiar with my habits will have to see what I'm actually doing without subconsciously connecting any dots. I know plenty of people who I'd trust more, but I'm interested in seeing how/if this works out. I suspect it will.
Otherwise, I haven't been painting much. Tonight I ruined something I had in the works, which soured me on the whole concept and I doubt I'll ever get around to bothering with it. Not for a long while at least. It started to feel like repetition. I did, last night, paint something I feel strangely about. It actually makes me a little uneasy. I haven't put it up in any of my normal haunts (ie flicker) because it doesn't feel quite finished. And the scan is bad. But I'll put it here, because I'm bored and trying to stave off the sleep goblins.
"she could feel her vigil spreading out under her skin, into her head, pushing the fever upward toward the roots of her hair. It was as if her arteries had become peopled with hot, tiny insects who, with the approach of dawn, awoke each day and ran about on their moving feet in a rending subcutaneous adventure in that place of clay made fruit where her anatomical beauty had found its home."
As I say, the scan is poor and the work feels incomplete. But when I saw what I had rendered the morning after, I don't know. It's weird to me. Outside of the normal scope of what I paint, I guess. Not that it's a bad thing. But it makes me uneasy somehow. Once I get over it I'm going to clarify the insects in the arteries, add the dawn light effect to the horizon and try to get the scan to look as fiery as it does in person. Hopefully soon. Tomorrow I'm going to use the thing I effed up tonight for some experimentation. I have saved things in the past by outlandish experimentation (like the time I saved Tesla's brain by inserting it into the body of a basking shark, or the time I was able to revive Stalin's moustache by transplanting it onto the face of a hapless meerkat), so one can hope. In any case, things are moving. I'm glad of that much.
Personal life is still functionally a shambles. I talked to someone the other day I haven't talked to in a long while. That felt good, however brief. Things like that are always bittersweet. Echoes of things that will never be and times never to return, branching lines of causality veered away from either by agents of will or the capricious whim of strange gods, and yet always dogged by the painful hounds of hope braying for their return. I obviously need to go to sleep.
